Given what his character experienced on Game Of Thrones, we’d think Richard Madden would be worried stepping into another drama about powerful families and their dangerous enemies. But with Dustin Hoffman also signing on, he’s showing no qualms about joining new historical miniseries Medici: Masters Of Florence.
X-Files veteran Frank Spotnitz, no stranger to period drama (albeit alt-history) after this year’s The Man In The High Castle show for Amazon, has co-created the series with Nicolas Meyer, who has his own credentials with historical fiction on Time After Time. Sergio Mimica-Gezzan is set to direct all eight episodes of the series in Italy, which will follow the titular family’s rise from simple merchants to an incredibly powerful cartel that helped shepherd and economic and cultural revolution, albeit with plenty of moral grey areas and building a long list of enemies.
Madden will be the family’s business-minded son, Cosimo de’ Medici, while Hoffman is playing family patriarch Giovanni de’ Medici. “The Medici came to power at a time of great social and economic inequality,” Spotnitz says in a statement picked up by Deadline. “They were great disrupters. Their banking practices led to the creation of a middle class, making them unimaginably wealthy. The Medici in turn used their vast power and resources to challenge traditional thinking, ushering in a new era of revolutionary art and science such as the world had never seen. It’s a powerful story that resonates even now.” Production company Wild Bunch’s TV arm will be selling the rights to the show at the Mipcom media market in October, so we’ll see if a UK channel nabs the show. Plans for Florence And The Machine to supply the soundtrack are, at this time, entirely the invention of our brains.